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How We Kill: Notes on the Death Penalty in the Philippines

Research · July 2019

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12609.71523

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How We Kill: Notes on the Death Penalty in the Philippines 

Joel F. Ariate Jr. 

A week after assuming office, neophyte senators Christopher “Bong” Go and Ronald 
“Bato” dela Rosa proposed the reinstatement of the death penalty through Senate Bills 
(SB) 207 and 226, respectively. Two incumbent senators refiled what they had proposed 
before: Ping Lacson sent in SB 27, Manny Pacquiao SB 189. 

Before filing SB 226, Dela Rosa verbally expressed his desire to have criminals guilty of 
drug trafficking executed in public by firing squad with live media coverage. He 
assumed that it will be a deterrent: ​”Yung gawing public na maging katakot-takot sa mga 
tao na gumawa, para hindi pamarisan. (​ To make it publicly gruesome to the people who 
committed it so others will be deterred from committing the same crime.) ” 

The bill that he filed, though, specifies no measure on how convicts should be executed 
or whether the execution should be made public at all. He said he changed his mind on 
the matter after hearing out a plea from one of his daughters. 

A week later, when pressed by broadcast journalist Karen Davila for proof that the death 
penalty deters crime, Senator dela Rosa brushed aside the issue by saying that nothing 
will get done if proof is always demanded. The import of his proposed legislation lies in 
his own personal experience as former head of the Bureau of Corrections, and not in 
some scientific research. He claimed a convicted Chinese drug lord advised him that 
the only way to stop the drug trade is to execute those who are involved in drug 
trafficking. 

So, this is now how we conduct policy making and legislation. A situation not far 
removed when kings handed down laws and executions were, by design, a carnival of 

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horror— half a millennium ago. If the history of capital punishment in the Philippines is 
any indication, its imposition has always proven to be a regressive step, both in dealing 
with criminality and in assigning value to human dignity. 

The theater of the macabre 

Based on the accounts of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish priest chroniclers like 
Francisco de Santa Ines, Juan Francisco de San Antonio, Joan de Plaçençia, and 
Francisco Colin, indigenous Philippine society practiced the death penalty. The 
condemned can be tied to a post and speared or whipped to death, hanged, or simply 
stabbed by the offended party as authorized by the village chief. The accounts were 
unclear, if not silent, if other people in the community were made witness to such 
executions. But distinct in imposing death as punishment in early Philippine societies 
was the chance given to the culprit to negotiate his or her way out of it. One can settle 
the penalty of death by either paying in gold or making one’s self a slave to the offended 
party. 

Only with the founding of the Spanish colonial regime in the 16th century did executions 
start to approximate what Dela Rosa and fellow pro-death penalty legislators may have 
in mind on why and how the death penalty should be imposed. 

In 1588, Estevan de Marquina, notary public of Manila, wrote in his report that Agustin 
de Legazpi and Martin Panga, leaders of a conspiracy of an uprising against the 
Spaniards, “being convicted by witnesses, were condemned to be dragged and hanged; 
their heads were to be cut off and exposed on the gibbet in iron cages, as an example 
and warning against the said crime.” 

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Basi Revolt painting by Esteban Villanueva, c. 1807; photograph by Lianne777 . Wikipedia 

Two hundred years later, the Spanish colonial authority still relied on the theater of the 
macabre to stamp the power of the king on the bodies of colonial subjects. And the 
Filipinos seemed to keep on failing to learn the lesson of the gallows and of mutilated 
corpses not to revolt against Spain. In 1807, leaders of the Basi Revolt in Piddig, Ilocos 

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Norte, were hanged; their heads were then cut off, put inside cages, and displayed in 
public places. 

In a span of two centuries, the key changes introduced in imposing the death penalty 
were in the methods of execution: firing squad and garrote. Death by musketry was 
reserved for those tried in a military tribunal, often for treason, rebellion, and 
sedition--crimes against the king and the state. In 1841, for example, Apolinario de la 
Cruz, a leader of a revolt in Southern Luzon, was executed by a firing squad and his 
body was dismembered and exhibited in public. 

In the 19th century, Madrid repeatedly ordered that hanging be done away with. The first 
order to have reached Manila came out in 1812. Instead of strict observance, however, 
the first half of the 19th century saw the application of all three methods of execution. 
Jose Montero y Vidal recorded that an April 24, 1832 decree of the King of Spain 
(received May 13, 1832 in Manila) ordered that hanging be abolished and replaced by 
the garrote. The shift in method of execution was a response to the spread of 
Enlightenment thought in the royal courts of Europe. Hanging and its attendant acts of 
mutilation were considered unspeakable acts of barbarity, which has no place in 
societies ever on their forward march towards civilization. 

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Garrote 

Public garroting; top photo from Joseph Earle Stevens' Yesterdays in the Philippines 
(1899), lower photo from History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines by 
Adjutant Ebenezer Hannaford (1900) 

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Orders from Madrid notwithstanding, hanging held sway in the Philippines. The garrote 
had to wait its turn. What remained was the bloody spectacle of executions. In an 1819 
account, John White, an English traveler in Manila, described the hanging that he 
witnessed as a “diabolical scene.” 

The hangman was habited in a red jacket and trowsers, with a cap of the 
same colour upon his head . . . I know not; but never did I see such a 
demoniacal vis-age as was presented by this miscreant; and when the 
trembling culprit was delivered over to his hand, he pounced eagerly upon 
his victim, while his countenance was suffused with a grim and ghastly 
smile, which reminded us of Dante’s devils. He immediately ascended the 
ladder, dragging his prey after him till they had nearly reached the top; he 
then placed the rope around the neck of the malefactor, with many antic 
gestures and grimaces, highly gratifying and amusing to the mob. To 
signify to the poor fellow under his fangs that he wished to whisper to his 
ear, to push him off the ladder, and to hump astride his neck with his heels 
drumming with violence upon his stomach, was but the work of an instant. 
We could then perceive a rope fast to each leg of the sufferer, which was 
pulled with violence by people under the gallows; and an additional rope, 
or, to use a sea term, a preventer, was round his neck, and secured to the 
gallows, to act in case of accident to the one by which the body was 
suspended. 
 
Yet, instead of conveying fear to the Manileños, “it was a tragic comedy” for them. The 
“mass of spectators . . . view the whole scene with feeling not far remote, I fear, from 
that kind of satisfaction which a child feels at a raree show.” 

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Dismembering the bodies of convicts seemed to have stopped with the introduction of 
the garrote. It was only after the 1887 Spanish Penal Code took effect that the use of 
the garrote in executions was seriously enforced. In 1890, a royal decree reiterated that 
the firing squad was only for those tried under the Code of Military Justice. But all 
executions remained public. Article 103 of the 1887 Spanish Penal Code even specified 
that “the corpse of the person executed shall remain exposed in the gallows for four 
hours.” 

The 1887 Spanish Penal Code remained in effect until 1932, when the current Revised 
Penal Code was introduced. What the American colonizers did upon their conquest in 
1898 was introduce amendments to the 1887 Spanish Penal Code to fit the imposition 
of the death penalty to their own regime. On December 18, 1906, the Philippine 
Commission Act (PCA) 1577 ordered that all executions must be done inside the Bilibid 
Prison in Manila. This step forward was coupled with a regressive step. Enacted on 
September 2, 1902, PCA 451 brought back hanging as a mode of execution. PCA 1577 
was also not applicable in Muslim Mindanao. 

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Execution of insurgents. Photo from Major G. J. Younghusband's The Philippines and 

Round About (1900) 

Hanging, the use of firing squad, and public execution—brutal remnants of monarchic 
and imperial penal regimes—will be revisited and reapplied in the 20th century by 
regimes seeking vengeance and ever conscious of appearing tough on crime. Right 
after the end of World War II, 17 Japanese soldiers were hanged in the New Bilibid 
Prison in Muntinlupa. Generals Tomoyuki Yamashita and Masaharu Homma, erstwhile 
leaders of the Japanese forces in the Philippines sentenced to death by American 
military tribunals for their supposed war crimes, met their fates differently inside a 
prison camp in Los Baños, Laguna. Yamashita was hanged; Homma was executed by a 

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firing squad. In possible consideration of Homma’s tenuous involvement in the crimes 
with which he was charged, the military tribunal was said to have afforded him the 
honor of a soldier’s death. 

Lim Seng 

The execution by firing squad of convicted drug Lim Seng . Screengrab from the 
documentary Batas Militar. 

Twenty-seven years after Homma’s death by musketry, another death squad was 
formed and ordered by a military tribunal to carry out an execution. But this time, it was 
not a matter of honor. The January 15, 1973, execution of Lim Seng for drug charges 

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was a high point in propaganda for Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorial regime. It was meant 
to put an end to the illegal drugs trade during that era. Though Lim was originally tried 
and sentenced to life imprisonment in a civilian court, Marcos decreed that his case be 
tried in a military tribunal. His execution was witnessed by thousands in the early 
morning hours in Fort Bonifacio. It was also an on-camera execution, making possible 
its broadcast in television and repeated showing in cinemas. And nearly 45 years later, 
the recording of said execution finally made its way into social media, again for 
everyone to see. 

Marcos propagandists take pride that under his martial law regime, “He did not 
implement a Death Penalty to a Filipino during and after Martial Law.” One can read that 
in a huge poster in Marcos’s World Peace Center in Batac. Lim was Chinese after all. 
But what of Epifanio Pujinio, Salvador Egang, Gaudencio Mongado, Belesande Salar, 
Jilly Segador, Causiano Enot, Nicolas Layson, Cesar Ragub, Cesar Fuguso, Leonardo 
Dosal, Juan Galicia, and Marcelo San Jose? Their pictures hang in the New Bilibid 
Prison in Muntinlupa, in the gallery of convicts executed by electric chair from July 31, 
1973 until October 21, 1974. 

Even historian Alfred McCoy bought the Marcos lie before offering this critique: “Lim 
Seng would become the only criminal legally executed in the 14 years of martial law. But 
there would be thousands of extrajudicial killings of labor leaders, student activists, and 
ordinary citizens, their bodies mangled by torture and dumped for display to induce 
terror.” 

Isn’t this where we are again today?  

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Hanging the Pardo Ladrones, Tayabas, circa 1900. (Original photograph at the Museo 
Sugbo. Photo taken by Joel Ariarte, Jr.) 

Killing Them Softly 

The history of the death penalty in the Philippines in the 20th century is the history of 
the state’s pursuit to clinically execute convicts. The political leaders may all have 
wanted to act tough on criminals, yet, in the execution chamber, the functionaries of the 
state went to great lengths to relieve or mask the pain for the convict in the course of an 
execution. They did not always succeed. 

Hanging is supposed to kill convicts not by choking them to death, but by breaking their 
neck during the drop. But as described in John White’s account, it became an 

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excruciating ordeal, with at least three people humping, and pulling at, the convict’s 
body just to ensure a quick death. The garrote is supposed to be an improvement on 
hanging. Instead of breaking the neck in an unsure manner, the garrote, at a turn of a 
screw, will snap the spinal cord and detach the neck from the skull, leading to 
instantaneous death. As with hanging, the actual practice differed from the mechanical 
calculations. An account by Felix Roxas, a curious child in the closing days of the 
Spanish empire, recalled seeing the faces of convicts on public display after being 
garroted with “protruding tongues” and “open eyes” bearing the marks not of snapped 
spinal cord but of “strangled necks.” 

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How the execution took place. Drawing that appeared in the Philippines Herald, 24 
September 1929. 

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The electric chair 

Then in 1923 came the electric chair. Mariano Jesus Cuenco, the author of Philippine 
Legislature Act (PLA) 3104 that changed the method of execution from hanging to 
electrocution, firmly believed that the electric chair will kill the convict instantaneously, 
unlike the excruciating death that hanging offered, which to him is “ignominious and 
barbaric.” 

Cuenco’s legislation even bears this provision that eventually became Article 81 in the 
Revised Penal Code: 

The death sentence shall be executed with preference to any other and 
shall consist in putting the person under sentence to death by 
electrocution. The death sentence shall be executed under the authority of 
the Director of Prisons, endeavoring so far as possible to mitigate the 
sufferings of the person under sentence during electrocution as well as 
during the proceedings prior to the execution. If the person under 
sentence so desire, he shall be anaesthetized at the moment of the 
electrocution. 

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Prison record of Epifacio Pujino indicating that he was sentenced to death by 
electrocution on 31 July 1973, the first of a dozen executions during Marcos's martial 
law. (From the Joel Ariate, Jr.’s research files. 

Of the 85 convicts that died in the electric chair, 17 requested to be anesthetized. Of 
equal number were those who refused any anesthesia. Some of them were advised by 
their priests to shun anesthesia for them to be clearheaded in their prayer in the last 
moments of their lives. The accounts or records of the other executions made no 
mention whether the convicts were given drugs to dull the pain of death. 

Death in the electric chair was, no doubt, painful and gruesome. The physician and the 
executioner would often coordinate to make sure that outward signs of pain were 

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muted. As retold by Dr. Ricardo V. de Vera, a physician who served at executions in the 
New Bilibid Prisons from 1959 until the ‘70s: 

Seeing everything is all set, I watch carefully the man strapped on the seat. 
His breathing is labored, and I can see very well the rising and falling of his 
chest as he respires. Inspire. Expire. Inspire. Expire. At the exact moment 
of expiration, I press the buzzer. A fraction of a second later two switches, 
one real and the other a dummy, simultaneously close permitting electric 
current to slam through the body of the doomed man. He shakes violently, 
the face and the body contort, his skin blackens, and an eerie sound 
emanates from the chair. But no sound comes from his lips because the 
lungs are devoid of air. After 3 minutes the current is switched off, and the 
body slumps with a thud. 

But there were botched executions. On April 28, 1950, Alejandro Carillo had to be 
electrocuted twice before he was declared dead; an electrical malfunction happened 
during the execution. A number of convicts literally burned in the electric chair. The 
smell of burning flesh tested the endurance of the witnesses; more so when there were 
successive executions in a day. On December 28, 1951, a journalist passed out after 
witnessing three executions in a span of 22 minutes. Emiterio Orzame Jr., however, 
showed extraordinary strength; when he was about to be executed on March 31, 1967, 
he ripped out the leather restraints and jumped out of the chair. 

Dwight Conquergood, a scholar on how death penalty is performed, argued: 

Botched executions knock down the ritual frame and expose the 
gruesome reality of actually putting a human being to death. The illusion 
of nonviolent decency is torn away. Botched executions also are the stuff 
of sensational news stories and political embarrassments. Graphic 

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 images and grisly reports of botched executions erode the public faith in 
the “ultimate oxymoron: a humane killing. To prevent embarrassing 
glitches and disruptions, modern executions have become ever more 
controlled, engineered, and bureaucratized performances.” 

Lethal injection 

At present, the use of lethal injection is the epitome of this kind of death work. 

The 1987 Constitution merely suspended the imposition of the death penalty by saying 
that “neither shall death penalty be imposed, unless, for compelling reasons involving 
heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter provides for it.” And, in 1994, Congress did 
provide for the reimposition of the death penalty for certain heinous crimes by virtue of 
Republic Act (RA) 7659. The preferred method of execution in RA 7659 is the gas 
chamber. But two years after the law took effect, the government was not able to build 
one. Going back to the electric chair was out of the question. Besides its documented 
cruelty, the execution chamber housing it was, in a rare display of poetic justice, hit by 
lightning and burned down on July 8, 1986. 

In 1996, RA 8177 amended both RA 7659 and Article 81 of the Revised Penal Code; it 
provided for lethal injection as the means of execution. Seven convicts were killed via 
lethal injection from February 5, 1999 until January 4, 2000. Then on June 24, 2006, 
Congress passed RA 9346, effectively abolishing the death penalty. 

In the 76 years spanning the first execution in the electric chair on June 25, 1924 until 
the last execution via lethal injection, the state had claimed 92 lives. Their executions 
should have been object lessons promoting fear and docile citizenship. But the state 
was caught in a bind. It can get rid of monsters but it cannot be perceived as imposing 

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the death penalty in a monstrous manner. This provided the convicts with ways to 
reassert their humanity. 

Marcial “Baby” Ama, upon his execution on October 4, 1961, donated whatever was left 
of his earthly belongings to the Home for the Aged and Infirm. In the 1960s, several 
executed convicts donated their eyes for those needing transplant. Casimiro Bersamin, 
a Bataan veteran and a convicted murderer, asked that he be shown the Philippine flag 
as his last wish during his execution on July 21, 1951. Leo Echegaray, convicted child 
rapist, had a wedding on December 28, 1998; he was the first to be executed by lethal 
injection on February 5, 1999. Others simply walked to their death with all the calm and 
dignity that they could muster. 

It is the height of irony for the public to learn not contempt and terror, but a lesson in 
human dignity offered by a criminal condemned to death. Instead of witnessing the end 
of monstrosity of a criminal life, the public sees the monstrosity of its government. 

A look at the history of the killing of convicts in the Philippines yields the lesson that a 
state relying on murder as a tool to impose its authority is weak and insecure, and 
unremoved from the very barbarity it would like to extirpate. The monstrosity of the 
criminal will be just a mirror image of the monstrosity of the state. 

As Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued, the “audacious dream 
of killing death”—the act of preserving society from the “dangerous classes”—turns into 
the practice of “killing people." 

Aren’t we already doing that? 

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(Published online in two parts by Vera Files. The​ first part w

​ as published July 14, 2019, 
the second part ​on July 15, 2019.) 

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